HTML entities and charset in IE

Question

I am displaying html entity ✓ (a check mark: ✓) in an html document that uses iso-8859-1 for the character set.

In Firefox, it displays as a check mark. In IE, it displays as a square box. Switching to UTF-8 doesn't seem to make a difference.

Is there a reliable way to display these entities in IE 6 & 7 without using images?

Answer 1

Square means that the font used does not have the glyph for that character.

Unfortunately, there are not many fonts containing that character, and none of them is present by default on all Windows machines (and even less on non-Windows ones)

The most likely fonts to be present (that contain that glyph) are Arial Unicode MS (comes with Officie), and MS Gothic + family (which is a Japanese font).

See here for a tool that can help you determine that font contains what glyphs: http://www.mihai-nita.net/article.php?artID=charmapex

But if you want a solution that works reliably, an image is your safest bet.